{"id":13672,"date":"2024-12-22T00:12:34","date_gmt":"2024-12-22T00:12:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/infundpros.com\/?p=13672"},"modified":"2024-12-22T00:12:35","modified_gmt":"2024-12-22T00:12:35","slug":"saudi-arabia-warned-germany-about-man-held-over-magdeburg-attack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/infundpros.com\/?p=13672","title":{"rendered":"Saudi Arabia warned Germany about man held over Magdeburg attack"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free<\/p>\n<p class=\"article__content-sign-up-topic-description\"><span>Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><iframe class=\"article__content-sign-up-iframe close\" scrolling=\"no\" id=\"signUpIframe\" data-prev-url=\"\/register\/in-article-sign-up?ft-content-uuid=5e2f3cd2-0a8f-4ac8-9afa-ca3d892d55f7\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<div id=\"article-body\">\n<p>Saudi authorities repeatedly warned Germany about the man alleged to have carried out Friday\u2019s attack on a Christmas market in the east German city of Magdeburg that left five dead and dozens injured, according to German security officials.<\/p>\n<p>The officials said Riyadh warned the German authorities the suspected attacker, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, a Saudi dissident who described himself as an ex-Muslim, had boasted on social media that \u201csomething big will happen in Germany\u201d. It was unclear if police ever acted upon the warnings.<\/p>\n<p>Al-Abdulmohsen\u2019s many posts on social media site X reveal him as a fierce critic of Islam who railed against Muslim immigration into Europe and in recent months exhibited a growing hostility to the German authorities, whom he accused of trying to censor him.<\/p>\n<p>Five people were killed and more than 200 injured on Friday evening when a man rammed into Magdeburg\u2019s Christmas market. Al-Abdulmohsen, the suspected attacker, was arrested at the scene. Authorities described him as a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia who came to Germany in 2006 and had been working as a psychiatrist in Bernburg, just south of Magdeburg.<\/p>\n<p>The attack has darkened the mood in a country already struggling with a profound economic slump and a phase of political uncertainty following the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz\u2019s shaky three-party coalition government in November.<\/p>\n<p>It came almost eight years to the day after an Islamic State militant ploughed a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12, and injuring 49 in one of Germany\u2019s worst ever terror attacks.<\/p>\n<p>Scholz visited Magdeburg on Saturday, calling the incident a \u201cterrible deed\u201d and promising that \u201cno stone will be left unturned\u201d in investigating the crime.<\/p>\n<p>Al-Abdulmohsen was an activist who publicly renounced Islam after leaving Saudi Arabia and created a website to help opponents of the regime in Riyadh \u2014 particularly women \u2014 flee the country and apply for asylum in Europe. <\/p>\n<p>His interviews and social media posts reveal him as a militant critic of Islam who nurtured sympathies for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party fiercely opposed to Muslim immigration.<\/p>\n<p>In recent months he had become increasingly hostile to Germany, and critical of its strict hate speech laws which prohibit incitement against certain religious or ethnic groups.<\/p>\n<p>He gave extensive interviews to German newspapers about his activism in 2019, describing himself to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as \u201cthe most aggressive critic of Islam in history\u201d. \u201cIf you don\u2019t believe me, ask the Arabs,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAfter 25 years in this business, you think nothing could surprise you any more,\u201d wrote Peter Neumann, an expert in terrorism at King\u2019s College, London, on X. \u201cBut a 50-year-old Saudi ex-Muslim who lives in East Germany, loves the AfD and wants to punish Germany for its tolerance towards Islamists \u2014 that really wasn\u2019t on my radar.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In one of the 2019 interviews, he said he had \u201cbroken away\u201d from Islam in 1997.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI found life in Saudi Arabia an ordeal, you have to pretend you\u2019re a Muslim and follow all the rituals,\u201d he said. \u201cI knew I could no longer live in fear and when I realised that even anonymous activism would put my life in danger as a Saudi ex-Muslim, I applied for asylum.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In the other, he said he had written posts criticising Islam in an internet forum run by the jailed activist Raif Badawi and subsequently received threats to his life. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey wanted to \u2018slaughter\u2019 me if I ever returned to Saudi Arabia,\u201d he said. \u201cIt wouldn\u2019t have made any sense to expose myself to the risk of having to return and then be killed.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In recent months, he appeared to have moved away from activism and switched to railing against the German authorities, peddling conspiracy theories more often associated with the nationalist right. In some posts he alleged he was being censored and persecuted by the German authorities.<\/p>\n<p>In a post on X in November setting out the \u201cdemands of the Saudi liberal opposition\u201d he called on Germany to \u201cprotect its borders against illegal immigration\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt has become evident that Germany\u2019s open borders policy was [former chancellor Angela] Merkel\u2019s plan to Islamise Europe,\u201d he wrote. He also demanded Germany repeal sections of its penal code that he claims \u201climit\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009free speech\u201d by \u201cmaking it an offense [sic] to insult or belittle religious doctrines or practices\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>His X profile features a machine gun and claims \u201cGermany chases female Saudi asylum seekers, inside and outside Germany, to destroy their lives\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>In an interview earlier this month on an anti-Islam blog he accused the German authorities of carrying out a covert operation to hunt down Saudi ex-Muslims while granting asylum to Syrian jihadis.<\/p>\n<p>In recent months his messages took on an increasingly threatening tone. \u201cI assure you: if Germany wants war, we\u2019ll have one,\u201d he wrote on X in August. \u201cIf Germany wants to kills us, we\u2019ll massacre them, die or go with pride to prison.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Read the full article <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/5e2f3cd2-0a8f-4ac8-9afa-ca3d892d55f7\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" rel=\"nofollow\">here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Saudi authorities&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13673,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-13672","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Saudi Arabia warned Germany about man held over Magdeburg attack | inFundPros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Saudi authorities repeatedly\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/infundpros.com\/?p=13672\" 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